ennisthemennis

I agree "any mice trial" is too strong a statement, and also 4 groups is kind of infeasible. But I do think there is not enough research on how these particular inbred mouse strains might bias research. Even the same strain sourced from different companies have produced different results, due to microbiome differences [1]. It's possible that we are way "overfitting" to these particular academic mice

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5870873/

Humans have a shit ton of unmeasured confounding effects though. Which means there is an even bigger leap between inbred mice and human studies. Not saying we should abandon the current way of doing things, but a little more diversity in funded research might be a good thing, because there are some modes of failure right now.

A way to evaluate drug efficacy that relies less on comparisons of large groups would be a big step, because there are a lot of disorders that are probably multiple mechanisms manifesting in similar ways

Ultimately there is always going to be some trade-off between making a rigorous statement and a generalizeable one, especially because biology seems to have some pretty messy abstractions. As collecting and analyzing large amounts of data becomes more feasible, I don't see why there shouldn't be some efforts to consider genetic (or environmental) heterogeneity in animal models. Ideally I think it'd be cool to approach any given question with parallel methods that can try to address how the hypothesis holds up both in more narrow but well controlled situations, and in the "wild"

It's more complicated than just St. Louis and San Diego not wanting to put up money. The owners of the respective teams wanted to move to LA pretty much no matter what, and requested particularly absurd things so they could pretend they tried